Brooks` Poetic Gift Savored In Tribute

June 12, 1991|By Jean Latz Griffin.

Abena Joan Brown, her gray hair in tight braids and her slim brown wrists encircled by gold bracelets, walked to the front of the theatre where a tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks, Illinois poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winner, had just ended.

The audience of about 150 had just seen ``Among All This You Stand Like a Fine Brownstone,`` Brown`s production of director Vantile Whitfield`s adaption of Brooks` poetry.

They had watched ``Way Out Morgan`` come back to the neighborhood and fiercely snip roses from his garden as he tried to come to grips with his grief and guilt over the death of his wife, Ida.

They had laughed at the strutting, self-possessed dandy, ``Satin Legs Smith,`` who said with a sly wink, ``A man must bring to music what his mother spanked him for.``

They had nodded at the wisdom of ``Martha,`` who, after watching her husband dance with a lighter-skinned woman at the Foxy Cat Ball, decides not to make an issue of it, saying, ``If the roof is stable, why worry about a leaf?``

And they had wept when ``Mrs. Sallie`` knelt over the body of her murdered child, Pepita, then struggled to her feet, saying, ``She never went to kindergarten. She never learned that black is not beloved.``

``Well,`` Brown said to the rapt audience.

``Well,`` they responded, hearing her word not as a question but as a statement that the vision of Brooks and Whitfield had, indeed, defined a world they knew and loved.

``I do feel blessed that we have so many fine writers who are able to tell our story, and that we are able to tell it in our own theater in our own neighborhood,`` she said.

For 20 years, ETA Creative Arts Foundation Inc., 7558 S. South Chicago Ave., of which Brown is now president, has served as a performance arts center for the black community on the South Side.

The tribute to Brooks, which runs through July 14, is one of seven plays presented this year and the latest of more than 60 since ETA`s beginning.

ETA`s Showfolk, a program of original plays for children, has reached 36,000 schoolchildren. Summer classes are offered in acting, music, dance, lighting and directing.

Readers` Theatre allows new playwrights to see their works performed and receive professional criticism.

After the play, Brooks, 74, dressed in a purple turban and skirt and flowered blouse, received a standing ovation from the crowd.

``I just sat here mesmerized, watching my lines come to life,`` she said. ``There were some iniquities-we will talk about them later-but I decree that all of you in the cast are poets.

For most of her life, Brooks has been writing poetry, crystallizing the experiences of black life and capturing the essence of being human, no matter the skin tone, with a gentle but raw wisdom.

She was born in Topeka, Kan., in 1917, and moved to the South Side of Chicago when she was 5 weeks old with her mother, a teacher, and father, a janitor whose hopes of becoming a doctor were dashed by economics after one year of college.

Brooks received a Pulitzer for literature in 1950 for ``Annie Allen,``

poems about black life in Chicago, and succeeded Carl Sandburg as Illinois poet laureate in 1968.

She is the recipient of more than 70 honorary doctorates, has published 18 books and edited three anthologies, and this year accepted the position of distinguished professorship at Chicago State University.

Her poetry can capture a concept or a person with equal eloquence.

Aloneness under her craft becomes ``delicious . . . like a small red apple.``

In a poignant description of the life of a black child who believes himself to be ``the ugliest little boy that anyone ever saw,`` Brooks describes his white kindergarten teacher as ``all tiny vanilla, with blue eyes and fluffy sun-hair.``

Whitfield is the founder of the D.C. Black Repertory Theatre in Washington, D.C., and recently completed seven years as funding director for the National Endowment of the Arts.

In the final line of the performance, the cast, costumed in black, beige and a wide palette of browns, turned to the audience and drew them into the actors` circle of art and the reality of Brooks` words.